#language

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. ↗

— Amy Tan

#concepts #daughters #family #fear #heritage

We have our own language. Christianese... We don't say 'He's out of his mind,' no, we say 'That's our youth pastor. ↗

— Tim Hawkins

#humor #language #humor

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. ↗

— Marcel Duchamp

#chess #god #language #life #religion

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. ↗

— Siri Hustvedt

#language #memory #words #imagination

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#imagination

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered. ↗

— Louise Erdrich

#story #life

The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect ↗

— David Levithan

#life #life

To abandon language is to stop/creating a place other than your own life/in which to live. It is to enter/the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god/is only possible through language. ↗

— Jude Nutter

#life

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence. ↗

— Simon Van Booy

#language #silence #love

there is [...] a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#love #love